Project 02 //

KYLE SIMPSON & IGN

A tireless evangelist for an open web, Kyle Simpson is known for breaking conventions and pushing boundaries. Along with the popular entertainment website IGN, this one-of-a-kind developer created an immersive HTML5 tribute experience for another unique character: gaming’s most beloved plumber, Mario.

From The Developer //

I think anyone that’s played a Mario game has built an emotional attachment to that character. So having the opportunity to use web technology to build an interactive anthology around Mario has been a blast. I think we’ve achieved a modern method of viewing content.

I spent quite a bit of time working on the architecture of the site. We wanted to do something unique with the way the user navigates the site. Rather than having a standard vertically scrolling experience, we’ve incorporated what I call “paged scrolling”. Once you scroll past a certain threshold it switches to the next page. I also brought in several libraries that I’ve worked on in the open source community, including a templating engine called grips and a dynamic script loader called lab.js. Other technologies we used include WebGL, three.js, socket.io, a custom audio/video manager using soundjs, and even Adobe Edge.

Additionally, we really wanted to focus on a user experience that fully embraced the reality of today’s very mobile and device disparate web. There was a heavy push to bring much of the desktop experience to touch devices. I encourage you to visit the site on a number of different devices to see how we’ve stretched the HTML5 technology to reach multiple platforms.

It’s inspiring to use these modern web technologies to tell stories that could not have been told previously and really bring the history of Mario to life. I hope you enjoy the project, share it with you friends, and take time to remember all the great memories each of us have about Mario.